Setting Up Shared Folders for a Virtual Machine

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You can set up shared folders for a virtual machine. Shared folders provide an easy way to share files among virtual machines and between virtual machines and the host system.

The directories that you add as shared folders can be located on the host system, or they can be located on network directories that are accessible from the host system. Access to shared folders is governed by permission settings on the host system. For example, if you are running Workstation Player as a user named User, the virtual machine can read and write files in the shared folder only if User has permission to read and write the files.

To use shared folders, the guest operating system must have the current version of VMware Tools and must support shared folders.

Important:

Shared folders expose your files to programs in the virtual machine and might put your data at risk. Only enable shared folders if you trust the virtual machine with your data.

You can use shared folders to share files among virtual machines and between virtual machines and the host system. The directories that you add as shared folders can be on the host system, or they can be network directories that are accessible from the host computer.

You can enable folder sharing for a specific virtual machine. To set up a folder for sharing between virtual machines, you must configure each virtual machine to use the same directory on the host system or network share.

Instead of using shared folders or copying data between a virtual machine and the host system, you can map a virtual disk to the host system. In this case, you map a virtual disk in the host file system as a separate mapped drive. Using a mapped drive lets you connect to the virtual disk without going into a virtual machine.